The End of the Trail

Feel, don't think. Use your instincts.

"The Phantom Menace" 

And just as I finish writing this review, I remember I never wrote one for Staffer Case even though I finished it months ago...

Professor Martin has brought two of his students, Emma and her friend (whose name is decided on by the player), from the United States to the country of Vendreka in Europe for a research trip. On the night before they board the train back to London, a murder occurs in the hotel they are staying: a person had been shot and fell several stories down to his death. Their interests piqued, the unnamed protagonist and Emma snoop a bit around the crime scene and befriend the police detective in charge, who allows them to look a bit around. The following day, professor Martin and his pupils board the train, which will take a few days to reach London. On the second day however, Emma is baffled by a mysterious disappearance. She had befriended a fellow passenger the previous evening and promised to meet her again this second day, but the woman didn't appear. That on its own might not be cause for any concerns, but when Emma asked the staff and fellow passengers who had been in the lounge carriage too at the time about the woman, nobody seems to remember having seen such a woman and in fact, it appears Emma might have been all alone in the lounge car. At first, Emma thinks she's going crazy, but as she and the protagonist poke around a bit, they stumble upon the possibility there had indeed been a woman on board, who has now disappeared. Can the two find out what happened to the missing woman in the 2025 game Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved, available for PC and Switch?

When developer Armonica LLC first announced Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved back in 2023, it caught my attention immediately. The developers were not shy about what the main inspiration was for their baby-in-the-making: Japanese adventure games, with command-style adventures like Famicom Detective Club, Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney, and Nintendo DS games like Another Code and Hotel Dusk as the biggest influences. While the "visual novel" school of Japanese adventures have become popular in the Western market, the traditional command-style adventure style is emulated far less often. The initial trailers and the demo however Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved were incredibly promising, offering great visuals invoking classic Japanese adventures from the late eighties ~ early 2000s and music, and teasing an interesting-sounding mystery. The game was finally released late November 2025, so how does the final product hold up?

To start off with the visuals and the audio: Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved is a must-see (and hear) for those who love the games I mentioned above. You can feel in everything how much the developers love games like Famicom Detective Club, Ace Attorney and Policenauts. The game features the familiar "command menu on one side of the screen" layout, though unlike Famicom Detective Club, it utilizes character art that is more animated, bringing them closer to the lively characters of Ace Attorney, with their personalities being perfectly conveyed through the player through the great animations. The artwork is really good, with also occasional cut-scene-esque stills that give the game a cinematic feel and the audio too features some great tunes that accompany your investigation into the missing woman. Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved feels right at home next to its direct inspirations and if you had told me this had been a game during that generation, I would probably have believed you right away. I honestly have no complaints in this regard.

Gameplay-wise, the game follows Famicom Detective Club more than Ace Attorney though. You advance through the story by using commands like "Talk" and "Check" to interact with other characters or the environment, and by talking with everyone, you gather more information which allows you to talk about *other* things to characters, slowly advancing the story. Fortunately, the game also takes inspiration from the more friendlier version of Famicom Detective Club, highlighting what commands you haven't used yet as an indicator of how to advance in the game. At the end of each chapter, the protagonist and Emma recap all the events that occured that day and the discoveries they made, resulting in a series of questions that are basically just testing your memory, though it occassionally also asks you to input names manually (instead of just choosing out of a list of options). This is a 'mechanic' also seen in games like Famicom Detective Club and Another Code, and as in those games, it's not really an engaging mechanic in any manner. There's no contradiction mechanic where you have to find discrepencies between statements and evidence or any of such interactive detective gameplay, so save for two or three puzzles, Detective Instinct plays very much like Famicom Detective Club, where you're just following the story.

The story however, is where I find the game not as engaging as its presentation. While it starts off with an interesting premise, a murder at a hotel and then a disappearance of a woman, the mystery plot is ultimately fairly short, and what I found most disappointing is that the more interesting twists and turns of the story, aren't part of your investigation. Once you're on the train, the focus of your investigation is on the missing woman (the question of whether she actually exists and if so, where she has gone to) and while you can probably guess it's somehow related to the hotel murder at the start of the game, I have to say the missing woman part of the mystery is by far the least interesting aspect of the plot. The how of how she was seemingly spirited away from the train is boringly simple, while the why might be better, but again, it's by far the least interesting part of the whole plot. So where does the player learn about the more interesting parts of the plot? Well, the other characters tell you about it! The minor advancements you make in your investigation for some reason always lead to characters revealing very important plot points regarding other characters set elsewhere, revealing an interesting scheme being worked out elsewhere, but you only hear about it because it's like almost everyone on the train knows a bit about that scheme, with Emma and the protagonist being the only ones who don't know a thing. But they only learn about it, because they just happen to be looking for a missing woman and each time they discover something regarding that mystery, characters start telling them also about the more interesting plot. So until the very end, I felt I was not investigating the more appealing parts of the plot and stuck with the least engaging parts of the mystery. 

Perhaps it's a matter of the scope of this game, as while it certainly punches above its weight in terms of graphics and style, I can imagine the developers were trying to limit the scope of the story a bit to keep the development of this game manageable. But to me, the story just lacked the twists and turns to keep me truly exciting to learn more about the mystery, while at the same time I could imagine me liking the story so much better if we had been investigating this case from a completely different angle, especially with these visuals. Due the smaller scope of the story, which also leads to a smaller cast of characters however, you get to spend more time with most of the characters (especially Emma), so that will probably please the players who enjoy these characters and want to learn more about what makes them tick, but mystery-wise, I can't deny I had hoped for much more.

By the way, while this game was written in English, I ended up playing it in Japanese because I first just wanted to see how it looked, but had overlooked the (very clear) message telling me that the save games for both languages are seperate: by the time I realized that, I had already advanced enough in my Japanese save I didn't want to start all over again. The translation is really good though and really makes you feel like you're playing an old Japanese adventure game. 

So on one hand, I really liked Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved for what it aims to do and in certain aspects, it not only succeeds greatly, but far greatly surpasses expectations, but on the other hand, I also think it's not as succesful as many of its inspiration in using the limited command-style gameplay to present a mystery story. Not all those games have interactive mystery gameplay like Ace Attorney, but can still present engaging tales of mystery via the kind of mystery they focus on, the way the twists and turns are presented to the player and by using foreshadowing/clewing, and that's where I feel Detective Instinct, Farewell My Beloved's presentation far outpaced the story. I am interested in seeing more of this studio though if they want to make more of these games.

These Names Make Clues

The more that you read, the more things you will know.

"I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!" 

For those interested in the guess-the-culprit games as mentioed below, creative members of the Honkaku Discord  venture each month to present a guess-the-culprit scenario to their fellow members, challenging them to solve their puzzle. Come have a look in the server if you want to try solving such a scenario yourself, or if you want to write one! 

Last year, I reviewed the anthology Suiri no Jiken Desu ("It's Inference Time", 2024) and earlier this year, I discussed Anata mo Meitantei (AKA What A Great Detective You Are, 2022) and Kibun wa Meitantei ("Feeling Like the Great Detective"). The stories in all these anthologies were designed as guess-the-culprit whodunit puzzels, with the stories clearly divided in a "Problem" part and a "Solution" part: all the necessary clues to solve the problem are presented within the first part of the story, so there's often an explicit Challenge to the Reader between these two parts: "this is a fairly written mystery and you have all the clues at this point, so try and solve it!" As someone who loves the puzzle-ness of mystery fiction, I just can't get enough of these stories, so when I heard publisher Tokyo Sogensha was doing an anthology series collecting past guess-the-culprit stories from various writers, I was of course immediately intrigued. I skipped the first volume (released in August of 2025) for the moment, as I already knew a large number of the stories included, but I decided to pull the trigger on the second volume: Yokochou no Meitantei - Hanninate Shousetsu Kessakusen ("The Great Detective of the Backstreets - The Best Whodunits", 2025), which also has the simple English title The Best Whodunits 2, collects seven stories selected by editor Fukui Kenta, who also wrote the foreword in which he looks at the history of such stories and similar anthologies.

The first story in the collection is the title story, Yokochou no Meitantei ("The Great Detective of the Backstreets"), a story by Niki Etsuko and originally released in 1972. The story interestingly consists only out of dialogue between the characters (so no narration) and with the historical setting, it reminds of a rakugo play. The story seems to be set in the Edo period and starts with the discovery of a theft in a small village, so they go to the retired elder to ask him for help. A paper craftsman had finished a scroll for a client and was on his way to deliver the valuable goods when nature called. He placed the package on a rainwater bucket on the corner so he could relieve himself in the bushes, but when he came back, he found the package gone, and no sign of any thief, though there were other peddlers and salesmen walking in the vicinity, who are all called upon to testify who they saw around the time of the theft. The story is fairly amusing to read due to all the merchants chiming in, but the main mystery is simple in design, as you basically only need to identify a certain lie, though to do that, you do need to combine information from various people and the basis for pointing out the lie, is well hidden. There's not really a "trick" here done by the culprit, just the need to find out how the testiminonies of all people fit assuming everyone but the culprit tells the truth. Very decent start.

Alibi Fuseiritsu ("No Alibi", 1973) is a story by Ishizawa Eitarou, a writer I do intend to write more of because his main series is about a police detective in Fukuoka, where I once lived. Alibi Fuseiritsu too is set in that city and starts with police detective Wakumoto receiving a phone call at the police station who says Akama Gouzou is dead, and that's lying in the apartment building next to the police station. Akama Gouzou was the name a real estate swindler had adopted. He had been deceiving people by first befriending people and then offering to sell them land for a cheap price: people handed him all their savings for the dream of purchasing some land to build their own house on it. The police had been investigating Akama already, but someone got to him first, and it's likely the murderer is one of the four people who were deceived by him and had already been trying to track him down after Akama started to lay low. The police had already interviewed them earlier for the swindling case, but the four are visited once again to ask them about their alibis for the murder. However, it turns out none of them have one: each of them claims that they received a call that night by someone purporting to be someone else in the group, with the claim they had found Akama and that they'd all meet at a certain spot to catch Akama and hand him over to the police. However, the calls were fake and they had all been sent to a different lonely spot in Fukuoka, leaving them all without alibis. It seems obvious the murderer orchestrated this so nobody would have a clear alibi for the murder, so how is the reader supposed to find the murderer? Well, based on the clues of course. This is a story that has a great conclusion, but the clues actually pointing to the murderer aren't all as clever as presented. It follows the Queen tradition of having to identify a few characteristics which apply to the murder, but some of those conditions presented in the story are rather questionable, like saying people working in certain professions wouldn't know about something, while that something isn't even something that is exclusive to a profession. Other clues are better and as I said, I do like the idea of what Ishizawa was going for.

Tatsumi Masaaki is a critic of the genre, who has written one serialized novel (which has not seen a collected release) and a handful of short stories. Umoreta Satsui ("Buried Malice") is one of those short stories and deals with an interesting problem. Yajima Tarou is an amateur detective who is asked by Handa Shinzou, a friend of his father, to assist with a problem. Handa and Sone Tamio are both looking for the son of Furuyagi Denjirou: before World War II, the Furuyagi Company was a well-known sales firm and Sone Tamio had joined the firm in his twenties. He became Denjirou's promising disciple, but business didn't go well right after the war, so it was decided to dissolve the firm for now, letting go of all the employees but Sone and Denjirou and his wife retreating to a mountain village. Sone became gravely ill just as Denjirou's wife gave birth to a child. Not wanting to be a burden, Sone gave up his position, allowing himself time to recover at a friend's place while Denjirou and his wife would go back to the city to try and start the business again. Later, Sone learnt Denjirou and his wife had passed away soon afterwards. Sone had been given the business contacts and a full recommendation by Denjirou in case he might not make it, so later on, Sone managed to set-up his own business as a successor to the once well-known Furuyagi Company. But then he later heard Denjirou had actually given up his son before he died, and that the son had been brought up by another family. Handa, the family friend of Yajima Tarou, also heard about this, and now Handa and Sone are looking for the son of Denjirou and they even use a television show to ask anyone with information to contact them. But then it turns out two men called, claiming they are the son of Furuyagi Denjirou. When later the midwife who found the adoption family for the baby is also found, they try to have the midwife identify Denjirou's child, but she's killed before she can make the identification.

I think in some way, it's fairly easy to guess who the fake one is based on the set-up of the story, but I do like some of the clues and the logic behind proving that a lot: some of the clues allow for quite some deep logical reasoning, considering the length of the story, but I think the surprise is a bit weakened because you can instinctively guess the solution to the main problem pretty easily even without those otherwise well-planted clues.

Dial 7 was written in 1979 by Awasaka Tsumao and deals with the underworld: Kitaura Shinya, boss of the Kitaura gang is found murdered in his house. As a gangster boss, he of course has many enemies, ranging from enemy gangs to people in his own gang who may have found themselves treated unfairly. The police have more than enough suspects, but can't seem to find any good clues at the crime scene until they notice the murderer must have used the phone after the murder. While the murderer was smart enough to not touch the phone directly, and used a pencil to turn the dial on the phone, the police was able to find out that the murderer called a number that did not use the numbers 8, 9 or 0. However, this was enough for the police to find the murderer. Though modern-day detectives might have problems with solving this mystery. I like the clues and set-up of this story a lot, but even if you know those old-fashioned phones with a dial, you still probably lack certain "common knowledge" information to solve this mystery, as it really isn't common knowledge now anymore. I do think it's a really clever story with subtle hints, that however is really strongly imbedded in the time/setting it was written for.

Sei Valentine Day no Satsujin ("The Murder on Valentine's Day", 1984) is a very short story by Okajima Futari, set at a baking school, where a group of nine students all made a chocolate-based sweet for Valentine's Day. The idea was to judge each other under the watchful eye of a teacher. They would all bring their creation, cover them up and the chocolates would be assigned a number. They'd then draw lots, and each person had to try out the sweet with the number they got and honestly review the sweet. The second person to try a sweet died however, as it turned out the sweet had been poisoned. But when they match the sweets to the creators, it turns out... the victim ate his own poisoned sweet. What happened here? Very short story, so the solution is also very short and simple. Neat idea, not sure if it's really suitable for this format though.

Hitori ja shinenai ("I Won't Die Alone", 1989) was originally written by Nakanishi Tomoaki as a guess-the-culprit scenario for the Kyoto University Mystery Club, but was also reprinted in a literary magazine in 1990 for a special on the Guess-the-Culprit tradition of the Mystery Club, with Ayatsuji Yukito and Norizuki Rintarou acting as the reader's guide. This is a very complex story and revolves around a group of friends, of whom most are either current or graduated members of a high school cooking club who often hang out with each other. Kouichi, a graduate, recently committed suicide, as his girlfriend Remi (a current member of the club) left him for someone else in the club. They still have gatherings where they cook together, but at the first gathering after the funeral, one of the members falls dead after consuming something: the food was poisoned, but the police thinks it's likely not murder, as no murderer could make sure one specific person would consume that food. They suspect it's suicide, but then the same thing happens again at the after-funeral gathering... If it is murder, how is the murderer making sure their intended victim dies? The answer lies in a series of intermezzos for the reader, where the murderer confesses they are just doing things randomly until their truly intended victim dies, but how is that fair to the reader? Well, it's still incredibly fair, with Nakanishi parading some clues very daringly in front of the reader, and yet, it's likely they will miss it. This is a very good example of a great guess-the-criminal story and certainly among the best in this collection. It's a bit long, but there's so much going on, it never bores and in hindsight, you'll see it's a very tightly writte story due to all the clues.

The final story, Tokeikan no Satsujin ("The Clock House Murder", 1990) by Imamura Aya has a somewhat confusing title. Ayatsuji Yukito has indeed written The Clock House Murders, known as Tokeikan no Satsujin in Japanese (disclosure: I translated the book in English!), but while both stories are pronounced the same in Japanese, they are written differently (different kanji). Both are about houses with clock collections though. In the Tokeikan no Satsujin in this anthology, an elderly man who had been many collecting clocks in his house, but his wife, thinking the house is too big for just the two of them, has them reform part of the house so it can function as a boarding house. Two clocks remain in this boarding house, though these clocks give the wrong time, because the owner likes his clocks to be 'free' and not chained to time. Ookuzu Junya, a writer of mystery stories became their first tenant, and since then, he has introduced more industry-related tenants to his landlord, like an editor and critic. The owner's nephew and niece also stay there, resulting in a rather crowded house. One winter evening, after dinner and Ookuzu has retreated upstairs, an editor arrives at the Clock House to visit Ookuzu to pick up a manuscript. When Mariko, story narrator, niece of the landlord and huge mystery buff, goes up to Ookuzu's room, she finds a letter, where Ookuzu says he's sorry he didn't his manuscript and that he will sneak out of the house and return when he's done. However, Ookuzu couldn't have left the house, as there were people in the sitting room (with a view on the entrance door) that whole evening. Ookuzu however is indeed gone. The following morning Mariko and her brother go out to make a snowman, but they find... a dead Ookuzu outside, covered in snow. How did Ookuzu leave the house, and reappear in the garden as a snowman? This is a delightful story: Mariko is so much fun as the snarky narrator badmouthing people as she sets the scene for the mystery. The mystery of how Ookuzu disappeared from his room is simple in essence, but Imamura builds on that simple concept to turn it into something much more complex, with plenty of clues that allow for some deep reasoning. What is also great is that this story also includes a bookending narrative, that adds another meta-layer to the mystery, making this perhaps my favorite of the collection.

So Yokochou no Meitantei - Hanninate Shousetsu Kessakusen is a very solid collection indeed. It collects stories from the late seventies until 1990, so most of the stories are quite a bit older than the Guess-the-Culprit stories I usually read, but some of these are really good, and I think the collection on the whole is worth a read. I have more of these books already purchased by the way, so expect more reviews about these game-like stories in the future too!

 Original Japanese title(s):　福井健太（編) 『横丁の名探偵　犯人当て小説傑作選』: 仁木悦子「横丁の名探偵」/ 石沢英太郎「アリバイ不成立」/ 巽昌章「埋もれた悪意」/ 泡坂妻夫「ダイヤル７」/ 岡嶋二人「聖バレンタインデーの殺人」/ 中西智明「ひとりじゃ死ねない」/ 今邑彩「時鐘館の殺人 

Sleeping Murder

"Uh, Jennifer, um, I don't know how to tell you this, but I... you're in a time machine."

"Back to the Future: Part II" 

I assure you: this book is more entertaining than the cover might suggest. 

In a not-too-distant future, mankind is preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime experiment. Nay, a once-in-a-millenium experiment. A private company is preparing to place seven people in a state of cryogenic sleep for a thousand years. The seven are to enter their sleep in special pods called tegmines. They are set to awaken one millenium later. To ensure their safety for all that time, the pods are placed in a special shelter in the mountains: the doors can only be opened from inside and because it's impossible to tell what will happen in a millenium, food and other supplies are also stored in the shelter, in case future researchers can't reach the shelter swiftly once the experiment ends and the seven awaken, allowing the seven to survive for some time on their own. 

And so, in the very-distant-future, Kuran, a former teacher who lost his wife, wakes up to find all kinds of tubes attached to his body, which he removes before he gets out his tegmine. As he watches the others do the same, he remembers how the members of the team had only met three days (+ 1000 years) ago before they entered their sleep. While six of the people were selected from a pool of people who signed up for this, one of them, Iriya is actually one of the researchers who worked on the project herself. One by one, they wake up: Kuran, Iriya, Shiina, Kuroe, Maruko and... then they notice the seventh person doesn't wake up from his sleep. As they examine his tegmine, it turns out it had ceased operation over a hundred-and-fifty years ago. They open the device, only to find a dead Shimon inside. Only, it doesn't look like he died because his tegmite stopped working, it's the knife in his back that probably killed him. The discovery immediately confuses everyone in the shelter: who could've killed Shimon, and why? Because the shelter can only be opened from the inside, it seems logical to assume the murderer must be one of the six others. The problem however is that a tegmite can't be operated from within the pod itself: even if Shimon and his killer happened to awaken a hundred-and-fifty years ago through chance, his murderer wouldn't have been able to get back in the tegmite again to freeze themselves again. For some reason, there's been no contact from the outside world yet, so the six prepare to wait for a few days, but when they go look for food supplies, they find the mummified body of a boy in the storeroom. His head has been bashed in, so they can't even tell whether it's someone they know, but this raises more questions: this boy wasn't in the shelter a millenium ago when it was sealed, so how did they get in, when did they get in, and how were they killed? The AI in the shelter's computer has been programmed to summarize all important news of the last millenium for once the experiment ends, so the six read up on all the major events, which includes a declining population and states forcing their population to move into concentrated areas, which may explain why there's been no contact yet. However, for some reason, there's a blank in the records: a period of about 125 years, between the last 15 years and 140 years, is completely missing, with no information whatsoever. They decide to explore the "future" world outside the shelter themselves, but what they find is not quite what they had hoped to see in Asane Juuji's Sennen no Whodunnit ("A Millenial Whodunnit", 2025).

A book that knows it has a cool premise so it doesn't even wait to hit you right with it: within the first 10 pages or so, you already know people had been kept in a cold sleep for a millenium and that once they wake up in their closed shelter, one of them has been murdered and that it's technically an impossible murder too: the reader knows right away they're dealing with an impossible murder, set in a closed circle situation and in the future too. It's a great set-up for an interesting mystery and while the story might not develop exactly the way most mystery fans will expect it to go, the book still ends up as  a fun sci-fi mystery. 

While the book starts right away with the mystery, the murder of Shimon actually isn't that important early on in the book for the very obvious reason that the six time travelers have more things to worry about. The experiment has apparently been succesful, but why has nobody come to welcome them into the future? Why is there no contact with the researchers who, together with future generations, were supposed to look after Karan, Kai, Iriya, Shiina, Kuroe, Maruko and Shimon? While knowing Shimon's been murdered, and there's an unknown dead boy in the shelter does disturb everyone, the priority now is to contact the outside world. Shimon's death being put lower on the priority list is also one that stems from the initial conclusions of the six that Shimon's death might not have anything to do with them personally: they didn't know each other until three days before the experiment started, Shimon was killed 150 years ago, and none of the other six could have been awake to kill Shimon and then go back into their pods, because they'd need someone outside to operate the pod (even supposing the existence of an accomplice, how could they have coordinated with an accomplice who lived over 800 years after they were frozen?). So the first half of the book or so seems more focused on discovering the world together with the six survivors.

After learning from the AI's summary of world events that most of the world's populations have been moved to concentrated areas due to declining populations, the survivors guess they have been forgotten and that the future humans must be located far away: their shelter was built deep in the mountains in a rural area a millenium ago, so if they want to go to the area where Tokyo used to be, they'd probably need to travel on foot for over ten days. Initially, they explore the area surrounding the shelter and occasionally find signs of where humans used to live. However, their discoveries lead to more questions. For example: why did they find so many skeletons lying in hospital beds in a nearby clinic, and why can't they find any 'contemporary' written records anywhere? As they slowly explore a larger area around the shelter, they find more pieces of a puzzle they didn't know they were working on, changing the focus of this tale from a "closed circle" mystery to an ontological mystery. Slowly but surely, a certain post-apocalyptic vibe creeps up on you, especially as the human history as the survivors know it has a 'blank period' for some reason, which started about 140 years ago.

As a mystery novel, the book does a good job at balancing the micro-level mystery of Shimon and the John Doe's murders within the shelter and the macro-level mystery of why there's no contact from the outside world. The whodunnit of the murders is given a whole new dimension if you factor in a millenium has passed. Early on, there's the matter of the survivors discussing Shimon's murder, and saying it happened 150 years ago already, but because they have also learned people in the future live much longer than in the time they knew, the murderer might actually still be around: something that would've been impossible with the common sense of their time. At the same time, the "futureness" of the story is kept fairly low-level, with the shelter apparently being far removed from future human civilization. These murders take a bit of a backseat in the middle part of the book, but they are of course addressed at the end, especially as we do learn there's a connection between their deaths and the bigger mystery of why the outside world is the way the survivors find it. The time-span of a millenium is used in a clever way to expand the problem of the whodunnit in a way most mystery novels can't and while Sennen no Millenium does weaves its sci-fi mystery tale using threads that may seem familiar from scifi and mystery fiction, author Asane also makes sure to clean up his threadwork and cut out excessive loose threads: it's a polished work, with story developments coming at just the right moments, clues and foreshadowing that are well-thought out and ultimately an overarching plot that is memorable, even if some of the twists feel a bit 'author-convenient'. While the direct motive for the murders is based on a reason that is probably a bit larger in scale than you'd expect at first, and coincidence is still alive one millenium later, but on the whole, it all holds together.

Though one does have to squeeze their eyes a bit to accept everything in this novel. Sennen no Millenium is not hard sci-fi by any means and at times, you do feel like Asane might not grasp the full length of a whole millenium completely. Just considering how much the world changed between AD1000 ~ AD2000, it does sometimes feel like the time period Asane describes is much shorter. Even supposing a certain language survived for a millenium, it's extremely unlikely two speakers a millenium apart would be able to immediately and quickly understand each other... Which also reminds me: early in the book the survivors read the AI's monthly synopsis of the world's major news for the last millenium to get an idea of what world they ended up in and... are you serious why are you reading a monthly synopsis do you know how much happens every month especially in a time like this how long would it take to read a millenium worth of that!!

Overall, I found Sennen no Whodunnit to be an enjoyable read. It's fun sci-fi mystery entertainment that might not be as 'hard' or completely fleshed-out in the way some readers might want it to see, but Asane uses his setting to create an amusing mystery that reads a lot like a mini-series. While as a mystery, some elements might seem familiar, I think Asane does a great job at implementing those ideas for this specific story and setting.

Original Japanese title(s):  麻根重次『千年のフーダニット』

The Secret of the Forgotten City

"A city on the verge of greatness"

"L.A. Noire" 

I used to review mystery video games quite often, though I have to admit I have fallen behind schedule the last two years, and even those reviews have become somewhat of a rarity here. Even rarer here however are posts on non-digital games, i.e., tabletop (board games). I have probably only reviewed a handful of them. Four years ago, I reviewed the tabletop game MicroMacro: Crime City, and that one has remained a favorite of mine since. So imagine how pleasantly surprised I was when I learned only a few months ago, an app version had been released!

MicroMacro: Downtown Detective (2025) plays in essence the same as the physical tabletop game. The player is presented a map of a lively where a lot of crime happens at the same time. The map is a delight to behold, as so many interesting (and often funny) things are happening in various beautifilly designed districts like a busy beach, a bustling market and a city center full of shops. Take a closer look however and you'll soon notice all kinds of crimes being committed: a dead body lying in an alley, a shoplifter in action, a thief on his way to sneak into an apartment... What is interesting about the map of MicroMacro however is that it is not a snapshot of one single moment: it simultaneously shows multiple moments of the same sequence. Imagine a crime being like a comic, with several panels used to depict how the crime happened and what happened next. In MicroMacro, all these "panels" are plotted on the same map, so you might see the thief entering the apartment, but if you look down at the street you'll see the thief preparing to climb up the wall, and if you're attentive enough, you might even trace him all the way back across the city map to when he first left his home. This is the core gameplay of MicroMacro, and this works exactly the same in MicroMacro: Downtown Detective.  

Just like in the board game, Downtown Detective consists of several missions, that vary in difficulty. The earliest missions will be easy, requiring you only to follow certain characters across the map, with many "moments" plotted on the map, making the pursuit simple. Missions are also divided in submissions or checkpoints, guiding you to what you should do next. Later missions will require you to pay more attention and may provide less guidance. You might be required to track several suspects as they all move around the map and find out which of them is the culprit for example, or the game expects you to make certain deductions based on what you see to guess where a character might also appear in a completely different place of the map. Downtown Detective in this regard feels generally similar to the board game, but with a caveat: Downtown Detective is a lot easier than the board game. As of now 25 missions are available (the first three being playable for free as a demo), but even the last few missions don't really match the mid-game missions of the board game. That is because Downtown Detective gives the player much more often confirmation about what they should do, or what they are doing correctly. The game for example clearly marks important scenes if you touch them, which confirms to the player that they are on the right track. This is not only true for the "major scenes" of a case, as the game will also mark minor relevant events, each time confirming for you you're doing it right. The board game doesn't confirm you're on the right track as regularly as the app version, making it a more difficult game. For example, if a character for example would put on a disguise halfway through, causing you to lose sight of them as they walk across city, Downtown Detective will always draw you attention to that fact ("Hey, he's gone. Perhaps he's put on a disguise?"), while the board game basically doesn't do that, allowing you to check the map yourself and noticing that small scene inside a house where you can just make out someone changing their clothes. These were the best moments of the board game, rewarding you for a keen attention for detail, but Downtown Detective really guides you along these moments, even if the core gameplay and mechanics remain the same across both versions.

Downtown Detective however does use some mechanics that aren't available in the board game, making use of the digital format. In Downtown Detective, you can freely in and out on the map (which of course isn't quite the same as just looking more closely at a physical map) and some details are only visible if you zoom in enough. That allows for some variety in the mysteries not seen in the board game, for example, in one missions where you are tracing a certain common object, that can only be differentiated from other lookalikes by noticing a small detail only noticable when zoomed in. The zoom in function is also really good for people with bad eyesight, which is probably great for people who have been interested in MicroMacro, but couldn't play it because the physical game does require you to squint your eyes at the map.

 

As far as I know, Downtown Detective contains a completely original city map. At least, I have only played the original MicroMacro: Crime City, and that featured a different map from Downtown Detective, though I haven't played the sequel board games to Crime City. The city in Downtown Detective starts out quite small, but it opens up in segments as you complete more missions. As of now, there are 25 missions, but there is a post-game message that says more content is to follow: something already foreshadowed by the fact you can see the silhouette of even more parts of the city that are waiting to open up in the future. The map is now smaller than it would be in the physical game, so I hope that with the future full map, the difficulty of the game will also be on par with the board game.

I might sound a bit negative, but I did really enjoy playing MicroMacro: Downtown Detective. If you haven´t played the board game yet, it provides a fairly good idea of how the board game works, which remains a great concept executed perfectly. Downtown Detective is a bit easy if you have already played the board game, as none of the missions match the later missions of the board game, but nonetheless, it's still a game I'd recommend if you're interested in MicroMacro, whether you´re a first-time player or a veteran, as the gameplay remains addictive. 

The Broken Anchor

Night of fire 

この気持ちに勝るものなんてないけど

「Night of Fire」(Dream) 

 

Night of fire!

There is nothing that can overwhelm my feelings

"Night of Fire" (Dream)

Disclosure: I have translated novels by both Ayatsuji Yukito and Arisugawa Alice.

"Mystery Night" was a special event to commorate the 15th anniversary of the "shin honkaku" (New Orthodox) movement of mystery fiction, marked by the publication of Ayatsuji Yukito's 1987 debut novel Jukkakan no Satsujin (The Decagon House Murders). The main stars of the events were Ayatsuji Yukito and Arisugawa Alice, and as many mystery stories are set in closed circles, the event was held in one, for the event consisted of a special cruise tour. Fans of mystery fiction would be spending one night on a ship where there'd be talk shows with Ayatsuji and Arisugawa, as well as a lot of fellow mystery writers like Nikaidou Reito, Takemoto Kenji, Yamaguchu Masaya, Maya Yutaka and Norizuki Rintarou, and there'd also be an interactive murder mystery show: participants would be presented the story of a mystery writer who was murdered, and try to solve this mystery (the writing of this mystery was supervised by Ayatsuji and Arisugawa). The book Mystery Night (2003) contains a detailed report of all that happened on the ship during the event, including all the interviews and the murder game.

So this is a bit of a strange book, as this is not a novel per se. Half of the book consists of the murder play, written in screenplay format. The other half includes write-ups and reports on all the other things that happened during the event, from how people arrived on the ship to completely transcribed interviews (and even a transcribed... magic show), as well as photographs of the trip and of the belongings of the authors which had been exhibited at the show. The trip was held twice, once in October 2002, embarking from Tokyo, and once in December of the same year, embarking from Kobe: this book reports on the events on both trips. The general flow of both trips was that people could get on board in the afternoon, after which the ship would depart the harbor. After a while, guests would be shown a video that laid out the basics of the murder game they'd try to solve. They could then find panels on the ship with additional information and the clues needed to solve the murder (for example, panels with close up photographs of the crime scene). In between, there'd also be dinner, with talk panels with the authors and at a certain point, the participants would also be asked to go to either an Ayatsuji or an Arisugawa room, where they'd talk a bit and also provide an exclusive clue to solving the mystery. At the end of the evening, people could fill in a form to guess who the killer was, and the big reveal, and they'd award the person who got the answer right by picking up on all the clues. The book reminded me a lot of Ayatsuji Yukito Satsujin Jiken - Arujitachi no Yakata ("The Ayatsuji Yukito Murder Case - The House of the Owners"), which was also a screenplay-format write up of a murder mystery play in honor of Ayatsuji, accompanied by write-ups on the events around it.

The story of the murder play revolved around Katayama Kippei, an infamous mystery writer who was harshly criticized for his books that were basically plagiarized from other writers. One day, he didn't appear at an appointment, so his wife and his editor visited him in his office, which they found locked from the inside. When they got in, they found Katayama stabbed with a knife and his head resting on a few of his books (like a pillow), his body surrounded by torn pages from the books that were allegedly plagiarized. Oddly enough though, the police discovered the only key to the office in the victim's mouth, so how did the murderer escape? Among the suspects are Ayatsuji Yukito and Arisugawa Alice, as Katayama also published books titled The Hexagon House Massacre and The 64th Locked Room...

To be honest, I only picked up this book because I was interested in the murder mystery supervised by Ayatsuji and Arisugawa, as I have loved a lot of their collaborative work (on Anraku Isu Tantei and Trick X Logic). This story was only supervised by the duo though, and as a mystery story, I ended up not liking it nearly as much as I had hoped. While the backstory of the plagiarizing writer is pretty funny and meta, the actual murder plot is (of course) presented in a rather disjointed manner, with both parts with actual characters and dialogue, but also just still photographs of the evidence and things like the locked room murder element don't really come alive due to the dialogue-heavy set-up of the story, and the fact it was designed as a story where info would presented in several bursts (video/panels etc). I am not a big fan of the trick used for the locked room an sich, though some of the hints for the surrounding mystery are good. Though I guess I do very much miss the big "reveal that changes your look on how things played out" that a lot of the Ayatsuji/Arisugawa duo mysteries pull off greatly, making this one feel a bit underwhelming.

The interviews/talk shows give you some background information on how the men look back at (at the time) 15 years of shin honkaku and of course their work, but I have to admit I was not nearly as interested in the interviews as in the murder play.

The official site for this tour is still online by the way, and it looks DELICIOUSLY early 2000s Japanese website. It would fit right in in Project Hacker...

So Mystery Night is more of an interesting anecdote than something you really need to read if you're looking for Ayatsuji/Arisugawa mystery fiction. The interviews might be of more historical value, as well as the write-ups on what is actually a very unique event (can you just imagine it!? A cruise trip to celebrate a group of authors and the mystery genre!), but I wouldn't bother go looking for this book for the mystery.

Original Japanese title(s): 綾辻行人、有栖川有栖（監修）『新本格謎夜会(ミステリー・ナイト)』